Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

The Severed Land by Maurice Gee is the first YA novel from Maurice in
7 years and is available now at booksellers nationwide.

The Severed Land is truly gripping, brilliantly written, fresh and
powerful – you really feel you’re in the hands of a master storyteller. You’re
thrust into an utterly believable, vivid and scary world without any obvious
descriptions or laboured explanations.

Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s best-known writers for adults and children. He
has won numerous literary awards, including the Wattie Award,the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the New Zealand Fiction Award and the New
Zealand Children’s Book of the Year Award. Maurice Gee’s junior and young adult novels include The Fat Man, Orchard Street, Hostel Girl, Under
the Mountain, The O Trilogy, and The Salt Trilogy.

RRP $19.99

Imprint: Penguin (NZ)Footnote:Many years ago I was a bookseller in Napier and Maurice Gee was the public librarian. We became good friends and then Maurice went to Nelson and became a fulltime author while I went to Auckland to enter world of book publishing.We are now both retired and Maurice said the other day that he thought his writing life was over when part three of his Salt Trilogy, The Limping Man, was published in 2010. He said that this new work, The Severed Land "came out of nowhere and surprised me". So this is a real bonus for all those many Maurice Gee fans out there.Although described as a YA novel I warmly recommend it to adults also. A brilliant piece of writing.

Get ready to sequester
yourself in a small cool room wearing your heat-be-gone booties because this
month at Text we’ve got the gripping thriller Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit, a South
Australian-focussed edition of Griffith Review
55: State of Hope, a powerful work of non-fiction
investigation by Kate Grenville in The Case Against Fragrance as well
as gritty debut crime and a revealing tell-all memoir.

Not only that, but it may not be a prize anymore: “Organisers of the women’s prize have said they want its next sponsor to pay for a year-long boost for women’s fiction, rather than a once-a-year celebration when the winner is declared.”

Wally Lamb’s SHE’S COME UNDONE can be presented with many
classifiers. It’s a debut, a coming-of-age story, a novel about mothers and
daughters, an exploration into contemporary American anxieties, and a 1996
Oprah’s Book Club pick. READ
MORE

At Portfolio and Sentinel, Bria Sandford has been promoted to senior editor.

Former longtime chairman of Canongate for 22 years (and stepfather of Jamie
Byng) Christopher
Bland, 78, died
on Sunday of prostate cancer. He also had served as chair of the BBC board of
governors and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and published two novels in the
past few years.

The UK's Women's Prize
for Fiction is looking for a new sponsor after Bailey's said
it had "regretfully decided to make way for a new sponsor" after this
year's award. They took over sponsorship of what had been the Orange Prize in
2014. Chief marketing officer of Bailey's owner Diageo Syl Saller will join the
prize's board, however.

StatisticsBookNet Canada
released headline sales data for 2016 in advance of their annual research
publication. Point of sales data from over 2,000 retail outlets shows trade
book sales of 36.1 million units falling 6.4 percent ("slightly," in
their vernacular), with dollar sales of $740 million (CA) declining 3.6
percent.

Nonfiction declined 10.4 percent on a unit basis, and 7.1 percent in dollars,
as fiction fell 6.7 percent in units and 5.6 percent in dollars. Thanks to
Harry Potter, juvenile sales fell less than one percent in units, and gained
6.7 percent in dollars.

Former children's laureate Malorie Blackman has vowed to
boycott literature festivals and events in the US while Donald Trump's
"travel ban" policy - barring refugees and arrivals from
predominantly Muslim countries - is in place.

·This fall, Doubleday will release
The
Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, which is expanded from the
“only written remnant of a children’s fairy tale from
[Mark] Twain, though he told his daughters stories constantly.” | The New York Times

·“It isn’t Trump as a character, a
human type—the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist—that outstrips the
imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.” Philip
Roth on Donald Trump. | The New Yorker

·“The drama of Wideman’s personal
history can seem almost mythical, refracting so many aspects of the larger
black experience in America, an experience defined less by its consistencies,
perhaps, than by its many contradictions—the stunning and ongoing plurality of
victories and defeats.” A profile of John Edgar Wideman. | The New York Times Magazine

After a year that has shattered so much received wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps there’s some comfort to be taken in one nailed-down certainty: The chances of cricket ever displacing baseball, basketball or football in the bosom of the American public are close to zero.

How different things are in Aravind Adiga’s homeland, India, a nation of cricket obsessives. There, devotion to the sport is an enthusiasm that unites 1.3 billion people, propels its finest exponents to a status of semi-divinity and seems to offer a shot at transformative victory to every slum kid with the physical gifts and stubbornness to master the game. It’s this possibility that powers Adiga’s “Selection Day,” a novel about the bewitching dream of athletic glory.